Designing type with cars

When two type designers, an interactive artist, and a professional race car driver got together… a font was born.

In a project sponsored by Toyota, Belgium-based design duo Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta (of pleaseletmedesign) teamed up with race car driver Stefan van Campenhoudt to create a typeface using a car and some sophisticated software.

The project made use of a new Toyota iQ specially outfitted with 4 color markers, used for tracking its position. Interactive artist Zach Lieberman from openFrameworks (who creates a lot of cool stuff like this) was the brains behind the custom software which tracked the car in realtime as it was filmed from above. The software used the car’s motion paths to create the vector outlines which were then used by the type designers to create the free iQ Agility Font.